Idle Thoughts and Other Comments
Random ramblings from a curmudgeon spanning two millenia.
An extended family living in a duplex with a huge garden, greenhouse, maker shop and photography studio can lead to a lot of unusual happenings.
I hate spiders. I consider bugs of any kind a necessary evil but spiders are special to me because of the webs. And yes i know that spiders keep down the population of other flying bugs. And there starts but one of my love/hate relationships with all bugs. […]
Moral dilemmas come in all shapes and sizes. One of the most common is what does it take to be a good neighbor? Another is how do you avoid making enemies? These all come down to what is the definition of a good deed? […]
One of the results of a lot of life experience is that you develop a lot of interests. I chase hobbies and professions like a dog chases squirrels and shiny toys in the backyard. I’ve tried everything from fairly normal hobbies like model railroading and photography to the unusual like candle making, meteorology and stand-up comedy. From that last one mentioned, you can imagine why some lasted longer than others. But the real tragedy here is that none of them have really retained my interest. […]
We knew last night someone was in trouble when the ape brought that carrier cage from the basement. I looked at Roswell and he looked at me, both of us hoping it was the other one’s turn to go to the vet. Its too bad neither of us can read because there’s a name tag on the side of the carrier with a name on it. I was pretty sure it was my turn because it looked like the smaller cage that didn’t fit Roswell.
It got worse this morning when no one was letting us outside. What did we do to deserve this? After the ape with the high voice left we thought maybe they forgot. But the other one began wiping out the inside of the cage and put in a clean towel. I tried to look innocent in my cat bed but finally he picked me up and before I knew it shoved me, butt first, into the cage and carried me out to the car.
All the way to the vet I prayed to Bast that we weren’t really going there. Then I started thinking of much worse places to go so I just kept quiet and hoped he’d forget I was back there…no such luck.
What is it about apes that at the same time they say what a beautiful animal you are, they treat you so bad? The entire time they were cutting my claws they were saying what a good boy I am. If they think I’m so good why are they doing this in the first place? Again I realize it could be worse, some clown cut Roswell’s entire finger tips off years ago so he doesn’t have claws. At least mine will grow back and believe me I know just how I’m going to use them.
Then the real torture started when they started shoving pills down my throat. Well this wasn’t my first rodeo and I was able to give up quite a fight. These pills are totally unnecessary. I don’t eat worms! I eat birds and mice. Why do I need a dewormer?
One more needle in the butt and I was more than ready to go back in the cage. I think I’ll go take a nice long nap this afternoon and when I wake up I’ll be ready to make my ape let me chase the red dot.
All my life I’ve worked with technology. This has given me a innate distrust of anything more complicated to operate than piece of paper. It has always been my experience that tech is guaranteed to fail you at the time of most critical need. Of course it doesn’t help that I’ve always been involved in leading edge technology. But even the simplest device seems to spend its time waiting and conniving the best way to inconveniently make up for all the convenience it has supposedly brought into my life.
You have to realize technology can be any non-organic helper of man. This means that 10,000 years ago, a campfire was state-of-the-art technology. Now at this point we are talking about the art of staying warm at night. But the campfire was the first thing other than another cave person (I don’t judge) or animal (I REALLY don’t judge) that kept a caveman warm at night.
Let’s begin with the simple garage door opener. Oh I’m sorry. Today they call them garage door operators. When I found that out a couple of weeks ago I should have known that new ones were not gonna be an improvement. Merely a new set of experiences.
The compound has a detached double garage and the old garage door openers (because thats what they were called back when they were put in) were getting noisy and slow. One had even started spewing lubricant until there is now a dark, oil-colored stripe down the middle of one of the doors. Add to that, daughter-of-Snowball refused to quit using the remote with the sticky button so it was a crap shoot whether the door would remain down in the time it took her to walk to the house.
The nice, new door operators have an web interface so I can sit in my easy chair and know if the doors are up or down and close them if needed. I even get texts when the doors open and close which is an option I’m sure was designed by the father of a teen-aged girl. We don’t have anymore of those but its still a nice thing to know. So far I have only found the door stopped half-way once for no reason (door tech still hates me). With all of this brand new, state-of-the-door tech I still never feel like I can drive or walk away from the garage until I wait and see with my own eyes that the doors are closed.
This week I learned another technology that I can’t trust. I realized this when I walked into the bathroom and stepped on a soaked throw rug. I let out a scream that would have made a longshoreman proud. For no discernible reason, the toilet had surrounded itself with water.
The bowl was clear and at the normal level, the tank had filled and was quiet. So after removing the offending rug and with plunger in hand, I encouraged Snowball to flush the toilet while we both analyzed the proceedings. It worked perfectly – of course.
The only theory we could come up with was that earlier that morning one of us had made an especially fiber-laden deposit and the bowl was temporarily unable to drain at the rate of the tank. This is only a theory because I sure as hell don’t watch the operation of the toilet if I can help it. It’s just another technology that waits for the opportunity to fail me.